In-House SEM Budgets, Salaries and Experience

Michael Phillips

Posted on 1.09.2008

The Search Enginge Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has published their first ever, in-house SEM survey, and the findings may surprise you. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that nearly one-third of in-house SEMs are managing a monthly budget of $200,000 or more. That far outweighs what SEMPO expected before the results came in. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so
we were pleasantly surprised,” says Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s
In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “The $200K
monthly spend is a healthy barometer of the search marketing industry and it
syncs up with SEMPO’s current trend projections that SEM spending will double by
2011, to more than $18 billion.”

The data was collected from 656 completed surveys and consisted of entry, mid- and upper-level in-house managers and analysts. While SEMPO membership was not a requirement to take the survey, chances are good that most respondents were SEMPO members - which means that many of these respondents were coming from larger corporations. Some findings: